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Super Hot StamperThe Beatles
Please Please Me
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Product DetailTrack ListingReviewsMono Vs. Stereo
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SONIC GRADE: (?) |
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| Side one: |
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| Side two: |
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VINYL PLAYGRADE: |
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| Side one: |
Mint Minus to Mint Minus Minus |
| Side two: |
Mint Minus Minus |
Rich and sweet, lively and natural, this is a great way to hear these classic songs. The music itself is nothing short of amazing. Please Please Me captures more of the live sound of these four guys playing together as a rock and roll band than anything that came after. (The better copies of Let It Be, on some songs at least, reproduce much of that same live quality and make a great bookend for the group.)
This vintage Beatles pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records rarely even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What the best sides of Please Please Me have to offer is not hard to hear:
The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1963
Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio
No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
Subtle Effects
There's a subtle smearing and masking that occurs on most pressings. You don't notice it often because you have no better pressing to compare yours to. But when you have many copies of the same pressing, and you are lucky enough to discover a Hot One lurking among them, you can hear instantly how much better defined all the instruments and voices are. You hear the ambience and presence that's veiled on other LPs. Dynamic contrasts increase.
It all starts to sound right, so right in fact that you forget it's a record and you find yourself just enjoying the music. Disbelief has been suspended.
Startling Presence
On the top copies, the presence of the vocals and guitars is so real it's positively startling at times. What started out as a great Beatles recording had turned into a great Beatles album. Now it's a piece of music as opposed to a piece of plastic.
Just play Baby It's You to hear what we're talking about. When the boys all say "Oooooh," you can pick out WHO is saying it and HOW they're saying it.
Anna (Go To Him) is another stunner. It's Tubey Magical with amazing immediacy and presence. The voices are PERFECTION -- smooth, sweet, rich, full and breathy. The overall sound is lively and energetic with a meaty bottom end -- in other words, it really rocks!
What We're Listening For on Please Please Me
Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks for the guitars and drums, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering -- which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
Then: presence and immediacy. The instruments and voices are jumping right out of the speakers as The Beatles' brilliant engineer for their early albums up through Rubber Soul -- Norman Smith -- intended.
Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Stampers
Please Please Me Hot Stampers are a regular feature on our site. We've been telling anyone who will listen for YEARS that The Beatles in their early days were exceptionally well-recorded, but only the right pressing will prove that.
And the odd thing -- not so odd to us anymore but odd to most record collectors I would guess -- is that many of the hot copies have exactly the same stampers as the less than hot copies. It's a mystery, and the only way to solve such a mystery is... to play the record. That's what we do around here all day, and what we heard on this copy was musically involving Hot Stamper sound.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic that is a key part of the appeal of these wonderful recordings.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.
Track Commentary
The Track Listing tab above will take you to an extensive song by song breakdown for each side, with plenty of What to Listen For (WTLF) advice.
Track Commentary
Side One
I Saw Her Standing There
Like any of the boys' most radio ready singles, this song tends to be a bit bright. If this track sounds at all dull, there's probably no hope for the rest of this side.
Misery
This track should sound lively and punchy. The best copies have excellent bass definition and superb clarity, allowing you to appreciate how the wonderful bounce of the rhythm section really energizes the song.
Anna (Go to Him)
Does it get any better? This is the real Beatles magic baby!
Chains
Note that the vocals on this track are not as well recorded as they are on the track above. As a rule they're a bit edgier and not as transparent.
Go back and forth between the two songs a number of times and we think you will hear exactly what we mean. Although this difference is more audible on the better copies, it should still be noticeable on any Hot Stamper pressing.
Boys
Ask Me Why
Please Please Me
Side Two
Love Me Do
P.S. I Love You
Another track with a bit of that "mixed for radio" sound. On most pressings this song tends to be bright, thin, and grainy.
Baby It’s You
Listen carefully to the middle eight section -- you can hear the rhythm track levels turned down at the first bar and then back up at the last.
Some of the most Tubey Magical sound on the album -- we love this song!
This is the real Beatles All-Tube-Recording-Chain Magic, Parts Three through Seven. Every track from here on out is killer.
Do You Want to Know a Secret
Even richer and more Tubey Magical. How can it be this good!?
If you know someone who doesn't understand why anyone in his right mind would still bother with a turntable and old records in this day and age, play these songs for him. No CD can begin to do what a Hot Stamper pressing of this album can do.
A Taste of Honey
There’s a Place
Twist and Shout
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Notes on the MoFi Pressing
By the way, if you own the MoFi LP, do yourself a favor and buy one of our Hot Stamper pressings. (Actually any good British import pressing will do.) What's the first thing you will notice other than correct tonality, better bass and overall a lot more "life"?
No spit! As I've commented elsewhere, MoFis are full of sibilance because of the wacky cutting system they used. As I was playing this record a few years back, maybe by about the fifth or sixth song it occurred to me that I hadn't been hearing the spit that I was used to from my MoFi LP. You don't notice it when it's not there. But your MoFi sure has a bad case of spitty vocals. If you never noticed them before, you will now.
Pitchfork
Whether or not you think the Beatles are the best rock band of all time, it's hard to deny they're the best rock story. Their narrative arc-- of graft, tragedy, and stardom; of genius emerging and fragmenting-- is irresistible. More so when you factor in the sense that they drove their fascinating times as much as mirrored them.
But the satisfying sweep of the Beatles' epic risks doing them a disservice. It makes their achievements and development feel somehow predestined, an inevitable consequence of their astonishing talent. Of course, this isn't the case: Every record they made was born out of a new set of challenges and built around tough decisions. The marketing of the band over the past few decades by their record label, Apple, has been aimed at creating a sense of apart-ness: Let lesser talents digitize their songs, feature on compilations, sell their music to samplers. The Beatles are different. This flatters listeners who were there, but setting the band apart from the rest of the pop world risks sterilizing their music and making newcomers as resentful as curious.
Besides, at the start they weren't so different at all. Britain in the early 1960s swarmed with rock'n'roll bands, creating local scenes like the Mersey Sound the Beatles dominated. Rock'n'roll hadn't died out, but it had become unfashionable in showbiz eyes-- a small-club dance music that thrived on local passion. It was raucous, even charming in a quaint way, but there was no money in it for the big-timers of the London music biz.
At the same time the record market was booming. The Conservative UK government of the late 1950s had deliberately stoked a consumer boom: Aping the post-war consumption of the U.S., more British households than ever owned TVs, washing machines, and record players. The number of singles sold in Britain increased eightfold between the emergence of Elvis in 1956 and the Beatles in '63. Combine this massively increased potential audience with the local popularity of rock'n'roll and some kind of crossover success seems inevitable-- the idiocy of the Decca label in turning down the Beatles isn't so much a businessman's failure to recognize genius as a businessman's failure to recognize good business.
The Beatles' life as a rock'n'roll band-- their fabled first acts in Hamburg clubs and Liverpool's Cavern-- is mostly lost to us. The party line on Please Please Me is that it's a raw, high-energy run-through of their live set, but to me this seems just a little disingenuous. It's not even that the album, by necessity, can't reflect the group's two-hour shows and the frenzy-baiting lengths they'd push setpiece songs to. It's that the disc was recorded on the back of a #1 single, and there was a big new audience to consider when selecting material. There's rawness here-- rawness they never quite captured again-- but a lot of sweetness too, particularly in Lennon-McCartney originals "P.S. I Love You" and "Do You Want to Know a Secret".
Rather than an accurate document of an evening with the pre-fame Beatles, Please Please Me works more like a DJ mix album-- a truncated, idealized teaser for their early live shows. More than any other of their records, Please Please Me is a dance music album. Almost everything on the record, even ballads like "Anna", has a swing and a kick born from the hard experience of making a small club move. And it starts and ends with "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Twist and Shout", the most kinetic, danceable tracks they ever made.
The "evening with the band" feel makes Please Please Me a more coherent experience than other cover-heavy Beatles albums: Here other peoples' songs work not just as filler, but as markers for styles and effects the band admired and might return to as songwriters. McCartney, for instance, would go on to write songs whose drama and emotional nuance would embarrass "A Taste of Honey", but for now he puts his all into its cornball melodrama, and the song fits.
Please Please Me also works as a unit because the group's vocals are so great. At least some of this is due to the remastering, which makes the Beatles' singing thrillingly up-close and immediate. I'd never really paid much attention to "Chains" and the Ringo-led "Boys", but the clearer vocals on each-- "Chains"' sarcastic snarls and the harmonies helping Ringo out-- make them far more compelling.
And as you'd imagine, making the voices more vivid means Lennon's kamikaze take on "Twist and Shout" sounds even more ferocious. Done in one cut at the session's end, it could have been an unusable wreck. Instead, it's one of the group's most famous triumphs. This sums up the Beatles for me. Rather than a band whose path to the top was ordained by their genius, they were a group with the luck to meet opportunities, the wit to recognize them, the drive to seize them, and the talent to fulfil them. Please Please Me is the sound of them doing all four.
Is Mono the Right Way to Hear Please Please Me?
With all due respect to Sir George Martin, we've played a number of mono pressings of this album and were not the least bit impressed with any of them. The monos jam all the voices and instruments together in the middle, stacking them one in front of the next, and lots of musical information gets lost in the congestion.
Twin Track stereo (which is actually not very much like two-track stereo, I'm sure Wikipedia must have a listing for it if you're interested) is like two mono tracks running simultaneously. It allows the completely separate voices to occupy one channel and the completely separate instruments to occupy another with no leakage between them. On some stereos it may seem as though the musicians and the singers are not playing together the way they would if one were hearing them in mono.
Three-Dimensional Mono?
That's on some stereos, and by some stereos I mean stereos that need improvement. Here's why. In the final mixing stage, Norman Smith added reverb to each of the two channels, sending it to the opposite channel. This has the effect of making the room that the singers appear to be in stretch all the way from the right channel, where the Beatles' voices are heard, to the back left corner of the studio, where the reverb eventually trails off.
And vice versa for the instruments. They go to the right rear corner of the room.
Both voices and instruments "occupy" the entire studio this way, stretching wall to wall, with at least the "appearance" of three-dimensionality that extends the sound into the back recesses of the room.
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